Introduction to the Issue on Enabling Technologies for ... - IEEE Xplore

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IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN QUANTUM ELECTRONICS, VOL. 16, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010

Introduction to the Issue on Enabling Technologies for Digital Optical Communication Systems HE guest editors of the IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN QUANTUM ELECTRONICS (JSTQE) are pleased to introduce this issue on Enabling Technologies for Digital Optical Communication Systems. This issue aims at providing a diverse coverage of the current state of research in digital optical communication technologies, ranging all the way from deep-space laser communications to terrestrial fiber-optic transport, packet, and access networks to digital optical communications for computer interconnects and on-chip integration. In doing so, the subject matter covered by this issue spans about 15 orders of magnitude in transmission distance and about 9 orders of magnitude in aggregate data rates, thus demonstrating the vast application range of digital optical communication technologies. Owing to the exponentially growing bandwidth demands not only of our society, but also of increasingly important machine-to-machine communications applications, digital optical communications will continue to expand its role as one of the most critical technological underpinnings of modern communication and information technologies. Within each application area of digital optical communications, several invited papers, written by distinguished experts in their fields, review the state of the art in research and development and point toward important research topics of the future. This issue features a total of 17 such invited papers. In addition, an impressive number of 28 high-quality original research contributions stand witness to digital optical communications as a highly active field of diverse scientific and engineering research. These papers present new results on some of the hottest topics in digital optical communication subsystems, involving techniques from quantum and classical optics, solid-state physics, device integration, and advanced digital signal processing and coding. This combination of vastly diverse scientific disciplines, paired with the important boundary conditions set by commercialization, makes digital optical communications a challenging and highly rewarding field of research.

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The guest editors would like to thank the authors of invited and contributed papers for their high-quality submissions to this issue. They would also like to express their sincere thanks to the many voluntary peer reviewers, whose expert opinions have helped to shape this issue by critically selecting the highest quality papers and enhancing them through their valuable suggestions and comments. Special thanks go to Dr. F. Bartoli, Editor-in-Chief, JSTQE, for entrusting them in putting together this issue and granting the maximum amount of freedom to do so. Finally, they are most grateful to Chin Tan Lutz for all her hard work coordinating this issue at all steps of the publication process and for patiently bearing with them throughout the process. PETER J. WINZER, Primary Guest Editor Bell Laboratories Alcatel-Lucent Holmdel, NJ 07733 USA DAVID O. CAPLAN, Guest Editor Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory Lexington, MA 02420-9108 USA TETSUYA KAWANISHI, Guest Editor National Institute of Information and Communications Technology Tokyo 184-8795, Japan YURII A. VLASOV, Guest Editor IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 USA

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSTQE.2010.2052501 1077-260X/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE


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Peter J. Winzer (S’93–A’98–M’03–SM’05–F’09) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical/communications engineering from the Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria, in 1998. His academic work, largely supported by the European Space Agency, was related to the analysis and modeling of spaceborne Doppler wind lidar and highly sensitive free-space optical communication systems, where his research was focused on advanced digital optical modulation formats and high-sensitivity optical receivers using coherent and direct detection. In November 2000, he joined Bell Laboratories Alcatel-Lucent, Holmdel, NJ, where he focused on research on various aspects of high-bandwidth optical communication networks, including Raman amplification, optical modulation formats, advanced optical receiver concepts, and digital signal processing at bit rates from 10 to 100 Gb/s and beyond. Since 2010, he has been the Head of the Transmission Systems and Networking Department, Bell Laboratories. He is a Reviewer, an Associate Editor, and a Guest Editor of various journals. He has authored or coauthored widely in peer-reviewed journals and conferences and holds several patents in the fields of optical communications, lidar, and data networking. Dr. Winzer is currently an Elected Member of the IEEE Photonics Society Board of Governors and a member of the Optical Society of America. He has been an Organizer and a Technical Program Committee Member of various international conferences and workshops.

David O. Caplan received the B.S. degree (summa cum laude) in electrical engineering from Tufts University, Medford, MA, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, with focus on quantum optics and communications. Since 1996, he has been a member of the technical staff in the Optical Communication Technology Group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, where he has been engaged in research, design, and development of high-sensitivity laser communication systems and related technologies, with an emphasis on photon- and power-efficient transmitter and receiver design. He has led to the development of transmitter systems for the GeoLITE mission, the world’s first successful high-rate space-based laser communications system. His pioneering work on high-sensitivity multirate lasercom transceivers has been incorporated in NASA’s deep-space interplanetary laser communication initiatives, including the Mars and ongoing Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration programs. He is the author or coauthor of book chapters on laser communication transmitter and receiver design. He holds nine issued or pending patents. Dr. Caplan was a member of the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics and the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society technical program committees.

Tetsuya Kawanishi received the B.E., M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in electronics from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1992, 1994, and 1997, respectively. From 1994 to 1995, he was with the Production Engineering Laboratory, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic) Co., Ltd., Japan. In 1997, he was with the Venture Business Laboratory, Kyoto University, where he was engaged in research on electromagnetic scattering and on nearfield optics. In 1998, he joined the Communications Research Laboratory, Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (known as the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology from since April 1, 2004), Tokyo, Japan, where he is currently a Research Manager and is involved in research on high-speed optical modulators and radio frequency photonics. In 2004, he was a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego. Dr. Kawanishi was the recipient of the International Union of Radio Science Young Scientists Award in 1999.

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Yurii A. Vlasov (SM’07) received the M.S. degree from the University of St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree from the Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg, in 1994, both in physics. He was with the NEC Research Institute, Princeton, NJ, where he developed silicon photonic crystals, and was with the Institute of Physics and Chemistry of Materials, Strasbourg, France. He was a Research Scientist with the Ioffe Institute of Physics and Technology, St. Petersburg, where he was engaged in work on optics of semiconductors and photonic crystals. Since 2001, he has been at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where he has led the IBM team on silicon-integrated nanophotonics for on-chip optical interconnects and is currently a Manager. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York. He has authored or coauthored more than 70 journal papers and has delivered more than 150 invited and plenary talks in the area of nanophotonic structures. He has filed a few dozens of U.S. patents. Dr. Vlasov was a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the American Physical Society (APS). He has served on numerous organizing committees of conferences on nanophotonics under the OSA, the IEEE, the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society, the APS, the Materials Research Society, etc. He was the recipient of the Outstanding Technical Achievement Award from IBM and the SciAm50 Award from the Scientific American journal.